by Allan Massie
Mary arrived in Scotland on 19 August 1561. If Knox is to be believed,
the very face of heaven…did manifestly speak what comfort was brought into this country with her, to wit, sorrow, dolor, darkness, and all impiety; for in the memory of man, that day of the year has never seen a more dolorous face of the heaven, than was at her arrival, which two days after did so continue; for, besides the surface wet, and corruption of the air, the mist was so thick and dark, that scarce might any man espy another the length of two butts; the sun was not seen to shine two days before, nor two days after. That forewarning God gave unto us, but alas the most part were blind…8
Few acquainted with the vagaries of a Scottish August will be as certain as Knox that the foul weather that greeted Mary on her return to Scotland was intended by the Almighty as ‘forewarning’ that she was bringing ‘sorrow, dolor, darkness, and all impiety’ to her kingdom.
In fact, even Knox admits that her arrival was greeted with general joy, but he does so to point the contrast, to show how deluded they were, and then how short a time their joy lasted. Mary, while offering no challenge to the reformers, was determined that she should still worship according to the rites of the Roman Church. The news that Mass was to be celebrated in the royal chapel had men asking, if again Knox’s account is to be trusted, ‘Shall that idol be suffered again to take place within this realm?’; and supplying the answer, ‘It shall not.’ A demonstration threatened to turn into a riot, with calls for ‘the idolatrous priests’ to be put to death. At that moment, however, Lord James Stewart, ‘the man whom all the godly did most reverence’, intervened to guard the chapel door.
The riot may have been spontaneous; again it may not. Lord James may have acted out of respect and regard for his half-sister, the Queen; or he may have staged the whole thing to demonstrate that she must rely on him, that indeed she would find it impossible to govern without his advice and assistance. Mary took the hint, and soon created him Earl of Moray.
Moray, eldest son of James V and his mistress Margaret Erskine, was now a man of thirty, ten years older than his half-sister. He was a sincere convert to the reformed religion and an astute politician. He was in his way a patriot who believed in the desirability, even necessity, of the alliance with England, which alone could safeguard the Reformation; but he was also in English pay. He may have had an affection for Mary, but, resenting his own illegitimacy, he could not but think he would have made a better king than she a queen. He looked like a Stewart king, tall, dark, serious of expression and mind, and some suspected he had designs on the throne. In 1559 Mary’s father-in-law, Henry II, shortly before his death, had commissioned the Constable of France to send Sir James Melville (later Mary’s ambassador to the English court) back to Scotland to report on whether there was any truth in rumours that Lord James intended to supplant Mary, then still in France, and seize the crown for himself. Melville’s report suggested the rumours were unfounded. He was probably right. Lord James was loyal to Mary, as long as her wishes coincided with his interests, and for a few years she would be guided by his advice.
The Queen’s other chief councillor was her secretary – in modern terminology, secretary of state – William Maitland of Lethington, an intellectual whose intelligence provoked both admiration and distrust. (Some called him ‘Mitchell Wyllie’, a Scots corruption of Machiavelli.) In concert with Maitland and Moray, Mary pursued a prudent policy of conciliation. She had tacitly accepted the doubtfully legal Acts of the Reformation Parliament, which had outlawed the Mass, and when in 1562 the Catholic Earl of Huntly staged a rebellion, which had the intention of reversing the religious changes, she not only suppressed it, but rode with her troops, winning their admiration by her energy, grace and cheerfulness.
Knox, however, was irreconcilable. ‘If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit, and an indurate heart against God and his truth, my judgement faileth me.’9 He and Mary debated matters of religion on several occasions, at length, and by Knox’s account he invariably had the better of her. Her version of the argument might have been different. He boasted of having reduced her to angry tears on at least one occasion, which did not greatly disturb him, ‘seeing as I have offered unto you no just occasion to be offended, but I have spoken the truth, as my vocation craves’.10
Nevertheless, no matter how offended she might have been, Mary continued to pursue the middle way, one of tolerance, unusual, indeed scarcely known, in that time. This, however, was not a quality to commend itself to Knox and his fellow True Believers. Tolerance was laxity and laxity was sin, a defiance of the Word of God as interpreted by Knox.
The other immediate and important question concerned her marriage. Nobody supposed that she could govern effectively without the support of a husband, and she was herself eager to marry again and produce an heir to ensure the future of the dynasty. Elizabeth of England would remain unmarried – or, as she remarked, married only to her country. Her ability to hold out the prospect of a marriage was a valuable diplomatic card. Moreover, she was by nature reluctant to commit herself completely to any course of action and was indeed, to the reiterated anger of her ministers, constitutionally indecisive. But Mary seems never to have contemplated remaining single, and Elizabeth took a close interest in her choice. This was reasonable if she was ever to accede to her cousin’s request that she be named as her heir. Whoever Mary married might one day be King of England. That ruled out any foreign Roman Catholic prince – in Elizabeth’s opinion anyway.
There was one Scottish candidate, the young Earl of Arran, head of the House of Hamilton. He had been proposed as a possible husband when they were both young children, in the days when his father was governor and was being guided by Cardinal Beaton. Indeed, he had been taken to France with the little Queen in 1548. His father, who had been rewarded for turning against the Treaty of Greenwich with French lands and a French title (Duke of Chatelherault), continued to promote the match, and there was certainly a suggestion that if something happened to prevent the marriage of Mary and the Dauphin, then young Arran would be considered as a future husband. He had a ring that Mary had given him and that he believed was a token of her agreement, and as soon as Francis died he sent it back to Mary to remind her of the promise he thought she had made. Meanwhile, however, Arran had also been paying suit to Elizabeth. Disappointed of both queens, the young man, always nervous, highly strung and erratic, became mad. In 1562 he was placed in confinement, where he would remain, outliving most of his contemporaries, till he died in 1609.
Elizabeth had her own candidate for the position of the Scotch queen’s husband: Robert Dudley, whom she had created Earl of Leicester. This might be considered a generous, even selfless, offer, for the world believed that Leicester had been, perhaps still was, her own lover. Worse than that, it was also believed, probably falsely, that he had disposed of his wife, Amy Robsart, in order to free himself to marry Elizabeth. (Amy had died by falling downstairs – the story is at the heart of Scott’s novel Kenilworth – but rumour had it she had been pushed by her husband’s command.)
Mary regarded the suggestion that she should marry Dudley as an insult. Not only was she being offered Elizabeth’s leavings – her discarded lover – but worse still, Dudley was a parvenu. His grandfather, Edmund Dudley, had been a mere lawyer, one of Henry VII’s ministers – executed by Henry VIII in a popular gesture as soon as he came to the throne. Then, though Robert Dudley’s father John had become in succession Earl of Warwick, Duke of Northumberland and Lord Protector of England during the reign of Edward VI, he too had been executed as a traitor, having attempted to subvert the succession by putting Henry VII’s great-granddaughter, Lady Jane Grey (conveniently married to one of Northumberland’s sons), on the throne instead of Mary Tudor. So though it was no disgrace to die on the scaffold in Tudor England, the Dudleys were a disreputable lot; and Robert Dudley quite unacceptable to Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Dowager of France.
Mary must look elsewhere. She cast her ey
e about and it lighted on a tall, good-looking boy a couple of years her junior. He was called Henry, Lord Darnley, and he was, she said, ‘the lustiest and best proportioned long man’ she had ever seen.
Darnley was a cousin of both queens. His mother, Margaret Douglas, was the daughter of Margaret Tudor by her second marriage to the Earl of Angus. So Mary and Darnley shared a grandmother. Since Margaret Tudor was also Elizabeth’s aunt, Margaret Douglas was the English queen’s first cousin and she stood at one further remove of cousinship from the boy. Margaret Douglas was married to Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, who was himself a descendant of James II. Lennox had been living in England for some twenty years, since taking the English side in the last years of Henry VIII’s reign, and young Darnley was more of an Englishman than a Scot. He had a claim also to the English throne, though it was a doubtful one, since in his will Henry VIII had excluded the descendants of his sister Margaret from the succession.
Darnley was a pretty boy with some charm of manner, at least while things were going his way. His parents both adored him and had spoiled him, so that he became petulant and angry whenever crossed or denied his own way. He didn’t lack accomplishments: he was musical and wrote verses, danced and fenced well, and had a good seat on a horse. These were his good qualities and they were all that Mary saw. She fell in love with him and felt tenderly towards the boy when he contracted measles, nursing him as she had nursed her first husband, little Francis. It was the one sure romantic impulse of her life, the one time that she fell unreservedly in love. The English ambassador Sir Thomas Randolph reported that ‘great tokens of love daily pass’ between them, and believed that Mary was in thrall to ‘a fantasy of a man’. They were married on 29 July 1565; it was the first great blunder of Mary’s life.
The marriage soured relations with both Elizabeth and Moray, though some have argued that Elizabeth expressed her disapproval of the match in order to make sure it went ahead. Darnley had been brought up a Catholic. Moray objected to a marriage that might lead to the re-establishment of the Church of Rome in Scotland. This was not unreasonable; if Darnley was granted what was called ‘the Crown Matrimonial’, he might prove less moderate than Mary. Moreover, this marriage, unlike one Moray might have approved, would deprive him of power. Finding himself unable to prevent it, he raised his Protestant supporters in rebellion, subsidised by England, though less generously than he had hoped. Mary again rode with her troops. There was no real fighting – the incident became known as the Chase-about Raid – and Moray retired south of the border. The first significance of this inept rebellion is that it shows how insecure the Protestant party felt, how insubstantial their hold still appeared to be; the second is that Mary had turned for support to a Border nobleman, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, whom she now made Warden of the Marches, her lieutenant in the unruly borderlands.
Bothwell, who was some seven years older (and six inches shorter) than the Queen, was a rough, violent man and intensely ambitious. Most of his fellow nobles distrusted him. Some loathed him, others feared him. He was nominally a Protestant but stood apart from the Lords of the Congregation, for he detested Moray, and the feeling was reciprocated. His private life was scandalous. He had had an affair with Janet Scott, the Lady of Branxholm, who was nineteen years his senior and the mother of a quiver of children; and indeed no woman was said to be safe from his approaches. His enemies accused him also of sodomy, but this was a charge more often levelled than proved. He was said to have dabbled in witchcraft and the dark arts while a student in Paris. Yet he was not just a thug. He was fluent in French and knew some Latin and Greek, and Sir Henry Percy, an Englishman who had dealings with him in Bothwell’s capacity as Warden of the Marches, found him to be ‘wise and not the man he was reputed to be. His behaviour was both courteous and honourable.’11 Unlike most of the Protestant lords, he steered clear of English entanglements. He was loyal to Mary and would come to seem the one strong man she could trust. Her reliance on him would prove disastrous.
Meanwhile Mary had another confidant or favourite, an Italian called David Riccio or Rizzio. He had come to Scotland in the train of the ambassador of Savoy, and Mary had taken a fancy to him, because he was an accomplished musician and agreeable companion. When the ambassador went home, David remained behind and Mary made him her secretary with responsibility for her extensive correspondence with France. Before the Queen’s marriage, he was also friendly with Darnley, with whom he occasionally shared a bed. At a time when it was common enough for men to be required to lie together, beds being in short supply, this does not necessarily mean that they were lovers. Some have indeed thought Darnley bisexual, perhaps because his beautiful face was somewhat girlish, though there were also rumours that he frequented a male brothel in one of the closes off Edinburgh’s High Street.12 It was natural that Rizzio, as an intimate of both Mary and Darnley, should have favoured their marriage, but it was not long before the favour the Queen showed him, and her evident reliance on his advice, aroused anger and suspicion. He was rumoured to be a papal agent, an enemy of the True Religion, and Mary’s lover, this last despite his unprepossessing appearance; he was nearer fifty than forty, short, dark and ugly. The suspicion was without foundation. What the Italian offered Mary was agreeable, civilised company such as she had been accustomed to in France and now sorely lacked.
She was already disappointed in her husband. Darnley had a taste for what was called ‘low company’, and had already acquired a mistress. Nothing contradicts so clearly the picture of Mary as a great lover than her inability to hold the affection of her young husband for more than a few months. He was already piqued because he had been refused the Crown Matrimonial and excluded from government. The young fool was a fruit ripe for plucking by Mary’s enemies.
Wild rumours of plots and counter-plots were rife. Sir Thomas Randolph told the Earl of Leicester that Darnley and his father Lennox were conspiring against Mary: Rizzio would have his throat cut and Mary’s own life might be in danger. Lennox, he said, had assured Moray that if he supported Darnley, he would receive a pardon for his recent rebellion and be able to return to Scotland.
There was substance to this rumour. Indeed, Moray was in some urgency. A parliament was due to meet and the main item on the agenda would be his condemnation as a rebel and the forfeiture of his extensive estates. So the conspirators moved quickly. Darnley had already been persuaded that Rizzio was his wife’s lover, and was easily drawn into the plot. On the evening of 9 March 1566, a troop of men commanded by the earls of Morton and Lindsay, with Darnley in attendance, took possession of the palace of Holyroodhouse. Mary, well advanced in pregnancy, was at supper with her ladies and Rizzio when confronted by the rebel lords, led by Morton, Lindsay and the grim Lord Ruthven, who was said to be a warlock and who in his enthusiasm for murder had risen from a sick-bed, putting on armour over his nightshirt. They seized Rizzio and stabbed him repeatedly. He called out for mercy. So did the Queen. She was told to be quiet and threatened with being ‘cut in collops’ herself. The murder, performed in Moray’s interest and with his connivance and approval, was a direct challenge to her rule. It was a deed she could never forget or forgive.
She kept her nerve, however. That very night she made peace with her husband, despite the cruel and ignoble part he had played in the murder, and detached the silly young man from his confederates, telling him he was a fool if he thought them his friends, or men he could rely on. As her courage rose, his fell. One of her ladies slipped out of the palace carrying a message to Bothwell, who had earlier prudently made his own escape from Holyrood. Before dawn, the Queen, Darnley and a few servants left the palace by way of a secret staircase, then out through the kitchens and the abbey cemetery, to where horses were waiting for them. They rode hard for Dunbar. At one point they saw a detachment of soldiers lying, apparently, in wait. Darnley called for more speed, and when Mary protested that she feared she might miscarry, he told her crudely that they could well make another child if this one w
as lost. Fortunately, the soldiers proved to be Bothwell’s men, who accompanied them to Dunbar. After the night’s hard riding, the Queen cooked eggs for her companions’ breakfast.13
She then returned to Edinburgh, escorted by several hundred of Bothwell’s Border troops. Revenge may have been in her heart, but she was governed by her head. She sought once again to conciliate her enemies. The alternative was to risk civil war, which might invite English intervention. Furthermore, she could not be certain who was truly on her side and who against her. So pardons were granted. Moray was restored to favour. Darnley’s plea of innocence was accepted, doubtless with reservations on her part. Even evidence that the conspirators had received money from England was not pursued. Mary did not question Elizabeth’s bland assurance that she knew nothing of any such payment.
Three months later Mary gave birth in Edinburgh Castle to the child who would, as James VI and I, fulfil her own ambition and unite the crowns of Scotland and England. ‘My lord,’ she told Darnley, ‘God has given you and me a son, begotten by none but you.’ When her ambassador, Sir James Melville, relayed the news to Elizabeth, she ‘laid her hand upon her haffet [cheek] bursting out to some of her ladies, how that the Queen of Scotland was lighter of a fair son, and that she was but a barren stock’.14
